ABSTRACT
The international community is engaged in its most ambitious attempt yet to craft global agreements governing the management of refugee protection and international migration. At the start of its 2016 General Assembly, the United Nations issued a declaration committing its member states to the development, by the fall of 2018, of two “Global Compacts”, one on refugees and one on migrants, designed to resolve the deeply contested approach to contemporary distress migration. Among the most contentious and least well-regulated aspects of this human mobility is the movement of children and young people. As growing numbers travel unaccompanied by parents or other caregivers, the legal structures that once assumed children travelled as part of families and could therefore be accommodated within family migration regulations, are no longer relevant. Meanwhile legal work or enterprise related migration options are not available to adolescents. As a result young migrants are increasingly engaged in journeys that are irregular, unsafe and often severely penalized. The outcome is a sharply contested policy arena, where universal child rights principles based on respect for the “best interests of the child” clash with exclusionary security concerns based on suspicion and hostility towards unknown youthful “outsiders”. The proposed article will examine this contestation with reference to evolving migration policy and examples of current state practice relevant to child and youth migration.
